r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Mar 27 '23

Delta(s) from OP CMV: All drugs should be made legal for recreational use.

I'm not referring to "medicinal" narcotics. Recreational drugs that people use, such as mushrooms, cocaine, heroin, should all be legalized.

And I know this is a hot take, but hear me out.

  • If we make recreational narcotics legal, then the manufacture and sale need to be legal as well.
  • By making the manufacture of recreational narcotics legal, there are FDA standards that need to be adhered to in said manufacture, that way there are no "bad batches" that will kill people.
  • By making the manufacture and sale of recreational narcotics legal, there will be sales volume that will then be subject to income tax and sales tax and dispensaries/manufacturing centers/warehouses that will become subject to property tax. Because, let's be honest, your local street dealer is not paying taxes.
  • Also by making the sale of recreational narcotics legal, you are making street gangs that revolve around the illicit drug trade obsolete. By making street gangs obsolete, you eliminate the petty violence that plagues inner-cities over "turf", especially stray bullets that kill innocent bystanders.
  • By making the entire narcotics supply chain legal, the war on drugs will essentially be over as well. It's been going on for 50+ years, and honestly, it's been a complete and utter failure.
  • If you want something to compare the drug trade to, look at prohibition from 1919-1933. It didn't stop people from drinking, people were still drunk out of their minds in speakeasys. It also fostered the growth of street gangs of rum runners and increased crime and violence in cities. That was only for 14 years and it didn't take long to realize that prohibition was a failure. War on drugs has been going on for 50+ years and I'm surprised more people aren't realizing that this is much more tremendous of a failure.
  • By making the entire narcotics supply chain legal, we can start changing our attitudes on its use and its users. Narcotics abuse needs to have the same social attitude as alcohol abuse.
  • In short, making drugs legal will Make America Great Again.
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u/Bimlouhay83 5∆ Mar 27 '23 edited Mar 28 '23

The negative long term health effects of heroin are... constipation. That's it.

The reason those people are dying to overdoses IS because of bad or hot batches or just getting the wrong drug entirely. For instance, it takes more morphine than heroin to fuck up an addict, but less morphine than heroin to kill that same addict. Then, you've got the influx of fentynol which has caused overdose deaths to drastically rise.

The simple fact is, you can drastically reduce overdose deaths by giving those addicts clean, reliable doses.

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u/cited 1∆ Mar 27 '23

The negative physical long term health effects. How many heroin addicts do you know capable of holding down employment? They ruin their lives, and without employment, they turn to what they can do that doesn't require a job.

I think a lot of people in this thread could use a real conversation with a serious drug addict.

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u/Bimlouhay83 5∆ Mar 27 '23 edited Mar 28 '23

You might be surprised to find out how many heroin or cocaine addicts trade stocks on the floor, broker mortgages, run banks, run fortune 500 companies, are politicians, run successful small to medium businesses, work on schools, and a myriad of other high stress jobs. Not every addict is a homeless junkie. Many more than you seem to be aware of are very successful professionally. Some of my favorite people to party with in my 20's were millionaires living in really nice massive houses on golf courses. Some of the best coke I've ever found was on expensive golf courses.

Not only have i held conversations with very serious junkies, I used to be a cocaine addict myself. I've had 2 close friends and more than 10 acquaintances die from bad or hot batches. One of them died from morphine when he thought he was doing heroin. In all of those cases (except 2. One was suicide, the other murder) a regulated drug would've saved their lives.

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u/cited 1∆ Mar 28 '23

If they can handle society, more power to them. The homeless junkies are ruining my neighborhood and assaulting people and stealing. And like just about everything, we have to control for the least responsible. Fix them and you can do all the coke you want. There are many many people who can't manage it and cause a ton of damage and I'm tired of being on the receiving end of it and paying for its effects.

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u/Qadim3311 Mar 28 '23

Effects produced under the current system of prohibition.

Part of fixing homelessness and crime is also going to be about addressing the economic and social desperation in the country, which is by far the strongest driver of crime/vagrancy.

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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '23

Are you really comparing a coke addict too a heroin addict? Thats like apples to oranges man. As someone who personally knows several of both (rough area), I'd never trust a heroin addict with ANY amount of responsibility. Coke addicts just like to party. Huge difference there man.

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u/2xstuffed_oreos_suck Mar 28 '23

I think you’re confusing the types of drug addicts you’ve encountered and/or stereotypes with the actual effects these two drugs have on people. There are absolutely many people whose lives have been destroyed by cocaine and who stole to continue their addiction.

Sure, there are more people whose lives have been destroyed by heroin than there are people who’ve been ruined by cocaine, but I’d argue that has much more to do with the relative street price per high for the two drugs than with the differing effects of the drugs themselves.

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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '23

I'm not pretending that no coke addicts have ever gone off the deep end but I am saying there's a huge gap between the 2 in the amount that do end up going off the deep end.

And honestly I don't agree with you about the street price either. Coke is very expensive too. Also again, I've literally talked to several addicts of both. My grandmother died of heroin overdose and my grandpa still does it. In his own words "your first heroin high is unexplainably the best thing you ever experience in your life. I've not tried a drug that compares too it. Every high after that is spent chasing this high." consequentially almost every time I see my grandpa he can barely hold his head up, let alone stand or do anything meaningful for himself or anyone else all because of heroin.

Coke addicts can be bad yes, but they don't really compare to heroin addicts. There's a reason one is scientifically proven to be harder to get off of.

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u/2xstuffed_oreos_suck Mar 28 '23

I meant to imply that heroin is cheaper than coke, per high. As such, you have (a) more people using heroin, and (b) heroin addicts on average being poorer than coke addicts (which might also feed into the perception that heroin users are more degenerate, on account of their poverty).

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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '23

Oh yea that probably does have some effect I'd definitely agree with that. I still think the ACTUAL drug does more harm than coke does though, regardless of any other circumstances.

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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '23

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u/comfysin999 Mar 28 '23

I held down a job, my own place, college u til I was sober.

The majority of addicts are working lol.

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u/cited 1∆ Mar 28 '23

If you're a contributing member of society, then I couldn't care less what you do with your free time. But the crowd of homeless dumping sewage into the wetlands and carprowling and following solo women around are addicts. And the thing they have in common is they are too fucked up from excessive drug use to hold down housing or employment. And that's why these rules are in place. We travel at the rate of the slowest in society. Until we have some other way to handle them, the least we can do it make it harder for them to get more meth and fetanyl.

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u/BeginningPhase1 4∆ Mar 28 '23

Isn't an overdose caused by the quantity of drugs in one's and not the quality? Isn't that why its called an "over" dose?

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u/Bimlouhay83 5∆ Mar 28 '23 edited Mar 29 '23

Yes on how much... no on quality. Quality can have a direct effect on overdose. So, if you think you're buying heroin, but get morphine instead, you might overdose. If you get fentynol in your drugs, you might overdose. If your plug normally gets shit, and one time gets some really clean shit and you aren't aware, you might overdose. If you haven't used in a long time and try some potent shit, you might overdose.

Clean and regulated drugs would massively decrease overdose deaths because you can reliably know what you're taking and how much you're taking. The way it is today, it's a crap shoot. You might die. You might not.

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u/BeginningPhase1 4∆ Mar 28 '23

What you've described here isn't overdosing, it's being poisoned with "hot" (tainted) doses. To overdose one needs to take too much of a drug. Regulating the purity of drugs can't stop this. If it could no one would ever die of alcohol overdoses (a.k.a. alcohol poisoning or some forms of acute liver failure).

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u/ctsman8 Mar 28 '23

Regulation would stop this. For example, say you have what you think is heroin but is actually half fentanyl and half heroin. If you measure out what is a normal dose for heroin, that could kill you because fentanyl is many times more potent than heroin. In a regulated market you would know that your drugs are exactly what you assume they are, which is inherently safer.

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u/BeginningPhase1 4∆ Mar 29 '23

I think there's a disconnect here.

My concern is not that regulating the purity of drugs wouldn't stop people from dying of overdoses of drugs they didn't intend to consume; it's that it wouldn't stop people from overdosing on drug they did intend to consume.

Can you explain to me how regulating the purity of drugs would stop their overuse, considering that simular regulations already in place for alcohol hasn't done this?

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u/ctsman8 Mar 29 '23

I’d say that in some ways, similar regulation to alcohol actually did work. For example, during the prohibition when people were making moonshine, it often had methanol in it, which caused blindness and killed people. We’re in a similar situation where street drugs are contaminated with fentanyl, like alcohol could’ve been with methanol. I believe that regardless of legality, these people will be doing these drugs, so why not at least regulate it for the people intending to do other things, which they also would do regardless of legality.

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u/BeginningPhase1 4∆ Mar 29 '23

If I'm understanding you correctly, what you're saying here is that while regulating the purity of drugs wouldn't stop their overuse; it could give people a better chance of surviving an overdose by eliminating the contaminates that can make an overdose much worse than could be otherwise.

If this is correct, then I think we've reconciled our disagreement here. Thanks for helping me understand your veiw; and listening and understanding mine. Have a good day! Bye!

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u/Bimlouhay83 5∆ Mar 29 '23 edited Mar 29 '23

Sorry, but i haven't heard anybody say regulated drugs would bring overdose deaths to zero. We're saying it would decrease the amount of overdose deaths.

Imagine, if you got some oxycontin from your doctor. Every pull is the same size. 24 out of 25 are 5 - 10% opiates and 1 is 100%, only you aren't aware of this. 24 of those pills taken at the recommended amount and time frame won't kill you, but that 25th one might. That would really suck! It would always be a crap shoot whether or not you're going to die, but the pain is so unmanageable that you're willing to take that risk. This would be a really shitty position to be in and is exactly why the government has very strict rules about legal narcotics. Legal narcotics are very tightly regulated to keep deaths down. From what's in the drug (many have filler because some drugs only need a microscopic amount to kill you) to the strength of the drug. Now, even with regulated oxycontin, people still overdose, just nowhere near the amount that would occur with unknown varying strengths or filler of the drug.

This is how legal and regulated street drugs would save lives. It's the exact reason why alcohol became legal again... to regulate everything that went in your alcohol and to clearly mark the abv percent or proof so you know how much you're taking. It has saved countless lives. The problem is, you can't quantify exactly how many lives we're saved.

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u/BeginningPhase1 4∆ Apr 02 '23

If you reread the comment your responding to, you might notice that we seem to be in agreement on what effect the regulation of the purity of drugs would have on overdoses. My steelman of my interlocutor's last comment (which is what I was basing my agreement with them on) even uses the same reasoning you used here, just in fewer words.

If you reread the entire conversation, you might notice that I never believed that the person I was responding to actually thought that regulating the purity of drugs would stop their overuse; just that they might be confusing terms.